Today we’re looking at how to get more HR Tech customers and I have kindly been joined by GetMoreHRclients reader, David Odier, who leads international growth for the exciting French & English-language talent portal based in Paris, Crème de la Crème.

How To Get More HR Tech Customers – Q&A With David Odier

Do you focus on a niche within the market or do you serve all businesses?

What are some effective ways you have acquired new clients/customers? What makes them effective?

Any ineffective ways to find new clients? Why didn’t they work so well?

Can you share some tips on interesting people, websites, tools, podcasts, or books to check out to help grow a business faster?

Let’s get into it . . .

1. What does your business do?

Creme de la Creme is a platform that connects the professional world with a curated community of freelancers in France and in the UK. Today, we rely on a community of 30,000 freelancers that possess every technical skills (business, tech, design, marketing…) and we’ve already worked with more than 5,000 clients including famous international corporations (e.g. LinkedIn, Google, Airbnb).

By outsourcing innovative projects via Crème de la Crème (lead generation, brand content, web-design, web-development…) on a regular basis, it allows these companies to focus on the essential: work on their core activities to foster their growth.

2. Do you focus on a niche within the market or do you serve all businesses (if so, how do you try to stand-out from competitors)?

Although there are other players on the market, we believe we’re unique in our value proposition for three specific reasons:

the quality of our service is highly correlated to the fact that we’re working with an amazing community

a community that is the heart of our business and we work with them everyday to help them in their success

the fact that we emphasise the human aspect of our service: a dedicated account manager is here for our customers and freelancers have a dedicated talent specialist.

3. Any ineffective ways to find new customers? Why didn’t they work so well?

I’d say even if something is not effective in the short term it can be in the long-run. For instance, I remember starting this emailing campaign back in September. Well, in the end one of leads came back to me early in January and we’re about to conduct a transaction.

There are channels that you SHOULDN’T exploit but it entirely depends on your business. For Creme de la Creme, since we’re targeting decision makers at established SMBs or Large Corporations Instagram is an ineffective channel (which we didn’t even try). I’m sure other B2B companies and professionals will understand.

My personal failure to find customers has been that I started an emailing campaigns targeting HR. My initial subject thread was “HR Innovation <> Creme de la Creme” and I’ve never had such a low open rate…

4. Can you share some tips on interesting people, websites, tools, podcasts, or books to check out to help grow a business faster?

Use this to improve, evolve, optimise and streamline your process to near perfection. The results will speak for themselves.

5. Any ineffective ways to find new customers? Why didn’t they work so well?

Completely avoid bombarding your audience on social media. Period

I believe that as a brand, your corporate identity and values and ethos are mirrored on social media. By only pushing out your own ads, and only engaging with your own content, your bond to fail.

A few months ago, we learnt this the hard way, when one of the staff members set up an automated job poster; throwing out plain “new job posted” ads on Twitter every single day.

Not only did people not engage with our content but we started to be blocked and unfollowed!

7. Can you share some tips on interesting people, websites, tools, podcasts, or books to check out to help grow a business faster?

Any marketer or business developer should read (or watch the TED talk) ‘Start With Why‘ by Simon Sinek. If you can apply that reasoning with your leads/customers, you’ll definitely succeed in enhancing the word of mouth effect that we were talking about before.

Next Steps

David and the team have done a great job growing this HR Tech business. As a tiny side note, I really like the small mention on their home page of their partnership with AXA – it adds credibility and gravitas. Small touches like this indicate a depth of thought throughout the business.